The State and Future of Board Games: From Apps to "Legacies"

[Music] hello can you hear me welcome to the state and future of board games 2018 edition wow thank you bit of housekeeping I will get in trouble with the CAS if I do not ask you to please fill in your surveys at the end of the session we incorporate the feedback that we get from those surveys tell us what you think what you liked what you'd like to see more of a feedback like that has been incorporated from last year into this year and will be again into next year it's like the circle of life from The Lion King and I can be here in a year's time holding up a cub for you if that is what you request please do not please put your phones on silent or make them extremely quiet and we'll have a general sort of oh thanks panelists also you will go through it a series of topics ourselves together and then we'll open up to some questions sort of

halfway through the session and close off about five minutes from the end for a sure thing that I also want to say thank you all for coming at 5:30 in the what I guess is now the evening my name is Paul Dean I am one of the cofounders of shut up and sit down I hope by now on the way here you have all seen our large very green this year gaming area which is Filipino tables you can sit down play a bunch of board games that we think have been particularly exciting over the last year it's a lovely place to relax do something non digital and also maybe accidentally network and discover that you are sat next to the audio designer from Bungie or something like that it is an absolutely wonderful space I assume you all also know you're here because you love board games you know they have exploded board game growth is now kind of exponential it is more than a billion-dollar industry while it's kind of tapered off for video games on Kickstarter board games on Kickstarter have gone insane we have now it's three and a half a thousand board games were

released last year up from a thousand in 2000 and about two two and a half thousand two thousand and five it doesn't seem to be stopping with me to discuss this incredible phenomenon is a series of panelists who can introduce themselves better than I could introduce them so we're going to start right here with hi everyone i'm jonathan yang I'm a game designer somebody it's on sighs woop I've designed a few games including Star Wars Imperial assault doom the board game and bargain quest many of them have been with companies and some have been independent and on Kickstarter so yeah hi I'm Tom Lehman I'm the designer of race for the galaxy many other board and card and dice games over the years I'm Andrew Fisher I'm the Bourdon card game manager at Fantasy Flight Games I've worked there for about seven years as a game designer I've worked on things like the Star Wars role-playing game the

rune wars miniatures game and most recently the fallout board game hello everyone I'm Anna I started in Facebook and social games someone that was still thing then I moved into mobile games and now I'm working at a company that's making diced it's an app that will help you learn board games so you don't have to read the rulebook thank heavens I'm gonna open with the same question I opened with last year which is we are at a predominantly video games conference so folks what is exciting about being a board games designer in 2018 why should we care about this why should we all be here right now talking about board games you're referring to we as in video game design all of us all of these folks who have turned up why can we justify ourselves at this conference clearly we can I mean board games are cool right like and getting cooler which is nice you know everyone in games are in basically the same business creating engaging interactive experiences and board games

are just as valid a medium of doing so and provide a good window into how to do exactly that a big advantage of board games that none of the mechanics are under the hood the way a lot of video games like can hide things with program your physics etc in board games you just have like a letter you've written to the player on how to enjoy a game and the margin for error is much lower there and it is a great way for video game designers to learn game design and for any kind of designer to get better I also think one thing that that's getting really exciting with board games is is kind of the merging of the digital side and the tabletop side my talk today was on just this topic my department makes a lot of app integrated games is what we call them they're basically board games that also require an app so they're a game that requires both digital and physical components to function on top of this a lot of the talks I've gone today to today are about integrating

apps into the process of learning games into creating digital versions of board games and so I think the lines are blurring between the two different forms and only continue to blur further as we introduce technologies like VR and AR and they become more accessible and more saturated in the market I think board games are going to get bigger and bigger I don't think it's a great time to jump into them if anyone here is thinking about changing careers well well there's a valid point that people are I mean your company if I'm correct is recruiting people are recruiting right now we haven't really creating unity developers we haven't it's worth it for a bit putting that out there but we we have we reached saturation I don't think so no I don't think so either I think more games can get right it's it doesn't seem to be going away there is a graph that we put up on shut up and sit downs news on Monday where someone had plotted the growth for board games and

it just goes like that over the last 120 years it's just absolutely insane Anna you work on apps that help people to learn board games which has always been one the barriers of entry and I generally like to ask the panel like is the way that we're learning these games changing I remember board games as a kid being drier generally having larger manuals the way old video games used to be it's not like that anymore is it we're getting better at this well I think that people are trying lots and lots of different approaches there's not only the integration with digital but there's also experiments like freedom and freeze had three games this year which are basically start with draw a card do what it says flee fear and so on and there you're building and learning the game as you start playing that and he's just doing that without any app or anything just building the game that way

legacy games also change things because you're discovering perhaps more of the game as you play which you know we used to call this program learning at one point but now it provides a way where the players have a huge incentive to actually learn the new rules so they can figure out how the game state is involving yeah so the way games have evolved the tutorials and the way to learn them have also evolved with them so we had a huge upsurge of YouTube videos now that will teach you how to play a game but we're with our app where at least we're trying to go one step further and actually have someone there like a digital person at the table that will teach you how to play the game I think board games will move more into that and I but games will be designed that have tutorials built into them already but there should be ways to play games that don't have that look so and touching briefly on we're talking about games

increasingly integrated with apps like mansions Madness second edition ex-con things like that is this the new future is it also the way forward that it's great to have an app that is the referee that as the shuffling for you and it moves it does that there's an imperial assault app as well wrong isn't it surely this is the best way to play games now just have someone else do all the legwork well it's really just another way to play games right and like it's not here to replace traditional board gaming I think you know these different forms are always going to exist but I do think that kind of a future of using digital tools to help even your traditional board games is definitely gonna be the case I mean look at the dice tap look at YouTube channels that teach games and review games like all of your traditional games a lot of people are still a lot of people don't even read the rule books they go to how it's played and other YouTube sites and get it explained to them by somebody who is much better at it than you know your friend Paul

who's just struggling through the learn to play at the at the gaming table actual fact so I do think well I don't think app integrated games and like technology integrated into the games is necessarily going to replace tabletop games I definitely think that technology augmenting even your traditional tabletop games is here to stay they're not gonna a fuse and board games and video games won't merge into something more powerful the kills yeah some some horrible game Iran yeah okay that's fine well there's certainly some resistance to always put in an app in a game because there are people who say they spend the entire day looking at their screens looking at their phones and when they want to play a board game they don't want to look at their phones so I think you're going to see a spectrum where some people are all in favor of the apps all in favor of integrating apps into the gameplay and some people are going to be resistant to it and I think it's great because the hobby is

growing we have the capability to satisfy many more different interests and gaming tastes than we had 15 years ago and there will always be those purists right the people who just want you know I want my tabletop gaming to be viable after the nuclear apocalypse where like I won't need any electricity I won't need any batteries or anything I can just play what I want to play and you know for them we will continue to produce games at as high a quality as we can manage and I think at the end of the day though a big thing to understand is that all tabletop gaming has a pretty fundamental priority of the player right and I always say this quote from Tim Bowers but you know what we do is we make software that runs on people which you know is like at its core like even the app integrated stuff right that stuff isn't is in some cases not meant to replace the player though sometimes it is it is meant to give the players a

valuable experience that is interesting and lets them not have to do things that aren't as exciting or aren't the game like shuffling now john someday we're just gonna have apps playing board games with you know other cut the human out of the equation you know just games playing games I mean if the apps have money I have news for you about it someday room that they already do that I think there's some talks on that let's go grim well speaking of Grima things we all grew up with video games to some degree and we used to video game piracy increasingly and I'm still trying to put my head around this and there's been more and more news about this over the last year or so increasingly board game piracy is a thing there are folks out there who will scan in a board game the scanning little cards and they'll just print a cheaper version of it and make that available to purchase perhaps overseas and to maybe a not so

savvy customer if you're buying the discount budget copy version the game of the original you may not know the difference and you may just think that you are saving a third or a half of the price apparently this has been happening for a while but I've only recently become more aware of it I wanted to ask any of you if you've been affected like directly or indirectly by this and also how you would think you would address a problem like this well Rio Grande games has had it with both race and Dominion and they are working pretty aggressively with Amazon to try to shut down the sellers of counterfeit and in fact they one of Rio Grande employees was testifying in court in New York a week ago about this so they're working on it well yeah I mean we haven't been like greatly impacted by it this isn't like a huge thing on our radar honestly we see less problems with

printed piracy often you know if the all the files of the game get online it's still almost as expensive as just going to the store and buying a nice copy for a customer to print a copy and reproduce all of the components of the game one of the bigger things we we tend to see is actually digital reproductions of our games on different websites or different like tabletop portals I mean they're they're really useful to the players but you know these these are you know kind of pirated digital versions of our games and so that's what we see more often really I think our main approach to this is is to kind of try to you know what are we missing for these players right and a lot of this is like the ability to actually get our content to wherever they live and so I think one thing that we're looking to in the future you know it's like for example all of our RPGs that we print tabletop RPGs we make are available on Drive -

RPG as PDFs you know and like I I think you know digital distribution of board games is something that we can look to in the future 3d printing is becoming more and more viable as consumer tech and so these are things we that we can look to as an industry as ways of basically selling to these consumers who want to get everything digitally basically and appealing to them I mean I think a big part of this situation is awareness right like the issue isn't that some people so when some people buy pirated games or they buy counterfeit copies they aren't buying them just because they you know want to get just because they want to get a good deal sometimes it's the only deal on the table for them right like it's actually a similar situation in video games like I think CD Projekt RED was involved like I was talking to some of them about how video games in their country were very hard to come across but you can buy like counterfeit CDs fairly readily and if they didn't have those they just wouldn't have video games and then we

wouldn't have The Witcher right we'd have the books not the games and you know in on that front like I personally don't really have a huge problem with you know so cheaper reproductions being made to service markets that we don't service in the first place my main problem is when say like regular consumers on Amazon who are like expecting you know the normal quality game are making this uninformed decision and being duped by publishers and that is something that I think is definitely that we need to address and has to do with supply lines and printing costs and it's a real issue since in China are you know I've been talking to factories and more and more factories are getting into the boardgame scene because it's so profitable and so cool and that means that there's more and more means to produce games as expensively or cheaply as you want and all you have to do is send them digital files and like ask them to print it and they're not you know some factories don't even know they like they just assume oh yeah this is just the game that you made right they don't know

everything they may know the Chinese factories may have never heard of race for the galaxy and so they're just being told hey can you print this game and here are my files and they're like sure here are the specs here's how much it costs and then you can get a huge print run of false race for the galaxy copies and then sell them as your own which sucks but I'm I'm not personally not sure what the solution to that would be it's just the magnitude of the problem so I mean I was gonna say is this just not gonna go away is this now gonna be a feature of the industry the way it's still a kind of a feature of the videogames industry I mean yes I mean people still wanna pyrrha things right its availability right like music piracy dropped tremendously the second you know what most people could have access to easily streamable content right so if we reach a state where board games are super readily available at reasonable prices which I don't know if we'll hit that state but if we do then absolutely piracy will probably drop off a cliff but till then I think this is something we might need to try another strategy also is that some of my games were now

producing Chinese editions already localized working with Chinese printers to print and separate European editions with different artwork and so on so that we can sell two products in two different markets with different margins this is something I've been working with with several publishers hmmm question for you actually do you have different quality levels or different margins for those print runs where it's like say if this community is slightly less wealthy are you gonna sell it at a lower price point in that market I don't believe there's any explicit setting but if you are obviously working with different printers then there may be different local standards as to what you know how thick is the cards and and so on

I feel that's a very good point I don't know if everybody hear that but you are working on lower profit margins it's a different kind of challenge for you this is slightly leaning into something I was going to bring up a little bit later but also how do we feel about distribution still being one of the biggest challenges for the industry because I feel like most of us I've been living in Canada I'm currently in the US and you live in Finland you folks they have all summer in the u.s. getting board games in Canada is surprisingly difficult sometimes especially because people just order them from America or drive to America because it's nearby how is it getting board games in Finland I've been trying to get fog of love but it's a Walmart exclusive so it's very difficult in Europe to get something like that I don't know a lot of board games are made here and made exclusively or sent to the United States and then shipping is really expensive to Europe so yeah it

sounds to me like this is still one of the obstacles that the industry is created for itself is that fair to say well I think it's created by the medium right just like you know there are physical games and so by nature we have to print them and ship them to somewhere and so to get them all over the world to everybody that might want them you need a massive distribution network you know as Maday has has a pretty large one you know that they have studios you know all over the world now and they have a pretty large and extensive distribution network but they still you know struggle to get games everywhere they want it to be and like certain countries like Australia see pretty large markups in price on on these and so distribution I think is I'm always going to be a challenge for physical product it's just a fact the matter but like I said I think digital distribution of stuff could help with that you know help with accessibility you know things like 3d printing and like print and play and

things like that can definitely help people who aren't kind of as part of like you know the main like game network get access to these things and just on that point very quickly is there anybody in here from Australia right now can I ask you to yell out sort of how much you pay for the average board game Wow 80 that still seems more than like 30 or 40 like even with the exchange rate right right now one of the other things affecting is simply that the cost of hipping has gone up a lot over the last times I mean I would immediately say why are we making things overseas and then already shipping them once and then even when we put them on boats and drag them halfway around the world it's most your customers are gonna be in the US if a few star numbers anything to to look at you know that that's why shucks is in America and not and in many cases the parts are being done but then the printing is done in Europe or the United States so you have some division there

so you're not shipping everything twice so the solution maybe at some point is if we can just print them all in our house that would be nice yeah it I can think of worse things to do we briefly mentioned legacy games before are they here to stay it feels like doing we've just had werewolf legacy announced risk legacy was now what six or seven years ago pandemic legacy see fall it feels like this is the sort of the flavor of the moment sharp in Sudan has looked at a number of legacy games over the last year or two and liked some of them and not been as excited as others I feel like this is a bubble that might burst or that these games work really welcome sort of cooperatively but as soon as it becomes a competitive complex thing like see fall or charter stone it kind of falls over is this just gonna we're gonna get bored of these within a couple of years personally I liked legacy games I think I've always thought

of myself not so much as a game in our first but as a storyteller and legacy games increase our ability to tell stories as far as the cooperative I think it's a natural extension of cooperative games to go the legacy route and I am sure that that will continue that's not of us competitive ones and I can say that I've designed one but it hasn't been announced are another beast and I had to go through a lot of trials and tribulations along the way so I'm not so sure that they will continue but I suspect as we designed more tools as we come up with more ways of dealing with the various issues that you'll see more of them that will be good is the challenge being if it's a cooperative game it's almost as if you're designing for one player you're designing for a group or in the same situation is the challenge that things become imbalanced

over a series of games when it is player versus player and there are winners separate winners and losers law as was discussed by mr. Honeycut here in the last session you know you have the runaway leader problem yes and how you deal with it do you introduce a second meta currency there's a number of different approaches that you can use I mean I think that the surest way to put your foot in your mouth in one of these is to like make a hard-and-fast declaration of what will happen so I don't I honestly don't know how whether legacy games are going to fizzle out or not though I doubt that they'll disappear entirely right they've done well enough people like them I think one of my major concerns is honestly the there are a couple of weaknesses within the legacy format which is the disposable nature of it right a lot of players don't like the idea of a game that they can't continue playing all the time which is kind of a silly response when it's like I barely play the games I own more than 12 times and you know

write and then sell them for not like but then there's also you know this idea of once you've started a legacy game with a group you are committed and it's like you either have to try and reel it back or start again and like it's hard to introduce new people more and once to a single legacy item I think it's gonna be a challenge and I'm really interested to see what techniques the industry does to mix it up and I mean I know jr. is gonna yeah give up my podium very quickly be a special guest there are games designing a junior honey cart the only person up here in shorts I'm really very sorry but that I didn't mean to jump and what legacy games have done to the environment of board games and whether they're gonna stick around right now whether or not legacy game stick around I think the impact it had on games in the last two years since the first quarter of sales for Kendon of legacy came out have been that it's pushing

players are pushing designers who wouldn't normally include deep narratives and games to include those deep narratives and I think you see it in Kickstarter that's both a push and a pull for designers to start actually working deeply on maintaining a real connection between the narrative mechanisms and board games and it's making for better products right and you're seeing it in the quality of games in the last year or two years like Raisa tell us is a game that wouldn't have existed if legacy games hadn't forced it and some of the continent has some influences there so and just quickly following from that I wondered asking Anna and Andrew surely something app supported is ideal for a legacy format if it does a lot of the work for us I don't think we've even seen the start of what legacy games can do and I think they're gonna stick around for a long time to answer your previous question but I think app supported legacy games are gonna be great for players who are hesitant about destroying their games or not being able to play them again and will introduce a whole new mechanic to games I also think

that you'll see some fusion between app driven legacy games and larcs right which is a whole different legacy game that's like and then break your iPad yeah yeah the coloring on your iPad it III think you know a lot of our existing app integrated games that fantasy flight makes kind of have a campaign aspect and half permanent choice and across many many plays and we do that that permanent aspect in the app but at the same time it's not really considered a legacy game by players I think um integral to the definition of legacy is the permanence the physical permanence of it no you don't see anybody complaining about having to make permanent choices you know in our ongoing campaigns and say like the route to legend app for descent or our legends alliance lap for Imperial assault you know that's just standard you know game campaigns I think there's

that physical aspect of like the disposability of it that gives that permanence to the decision and to throw my answer into the pot and stick my foot and put in my mouth as Johnson tastes fantastic yeah that can't be true uh I think that legacy as a mechanic is a tool that we've added to kind of our collective toolbox it is a I think mark rosewater from what Wizards calls it a technology this is now a tool we have and yeah it's it's super hot right now right but it's like deck-building when Dominion first hit deck-building was huge you saw so many deck builders you definitely see less fewer deck builders now oh and very different yeah and very different ones but you definitely still see deck building mechanics and they often come as like an aspect a portion of the game you see very few dedicated deck builders anymore but you see a lot of games that have a deck building aspects and so I think in similarly

we'll see the same thing with legacies at the legacy mechanic as it seems to have been termed and I think we'll see it used in different unique ways by designers that's just a tool in the toolbox even after it wanes in popularity yeah definitely I think since the pro games is such a growing industry and more and more players come into it maybe players that have played computer games before are used to like longer campaigns and playing over several several sessions the same game legacy is something that is gonna stick around for those players yeah yeah no that's that's valid um many of us video game is odd something in our DNA that makes us sort of genetically campaign kind of people and I don't know exactly where you draw the line between a legacy game and a campaign I will say on the if we are to for this conversation refer to legacy as games that involve a sort of emotional like physical sacrifice as part of an experience right destroying components permanently altering things it is

actually really exciting video games have started doing things like that near automata and doki-doki with richard club both have game elements that involve permanently altering the player's save file Nier automata has mechanic that allows you to actually remove your save file completely for a specific purpose that is I won't spoil but that is a genuinely deep and emotional decision that you can make which feels akin to burning a card on a legacy game right I'm gonna ask one or two quick more questions to a panel of experts in the meantime if anyone has things they'd like to throw at us please start queuing up there's a microphone over there you might be scared of it we got a lot of different questions about a lot of different topics last year and I feel the folks that we have this time we have a very good spectrum of experience speaking briefly about video games I play Carcassonne now mostly on my phone

there is now a very good race for the galaxy app do you do any of you worry that this is gonna take over the Hobby or that we're gonna lose our physical versions of some of these games are we gonna just play these games online with each other instead of in person there are games that I think there's something magical about tactile games and ripping cards for a legacy ins for example and plenty with cubes and rolling dice but an app can't really get rid of I will say there are games that I do feel are fundamentally improved after their transition to an app games like neuro Shema hex which is a good game but I just find kind of exhausting to play physically hmm just because of II like the way it's fiddly to deal with the components I mean you don't have to constantly worry about like you know managing all of those then it helps a lot which is why things or mansions of madness is a good example of one that was improved by a nap and there are games that go it's a spectrum so there are games that go all the way to just

being completely better by being entirely on an app and games that become completely different in an app like seven wonders is you know a kind of like solid kind of mid weight game once it's on an app it's super lightweight because there's no like you're not doing the experience of handing cards to each other you're not experiencing like laying them out and like looking over your things everything is just kind of very snappy and your decision-making has changed completely to just one thing and there's no physicality to it and it was interesting to me because I didn't realize that there was so that so much of the Seven Wonders experience is that communal playing with components like drafting cards by handing them to another person next to you that just feels nice and is part of the thing well you said it yourself at the beginning of this panel actually which is that we the released board games the number of released board games each year is is ballooning right we move at 3,500 you

said something like 3500 plus yes yeah we're not running out of board games honestly like you know this is an industry that is is still rapidly growing and rapidly integrating with the digital industry and so I don't think we have to be concerned about some kind of you know takeover I mean we were worried when video games started happening and then every did okay yeah that's far enough very quickly Tom I mean race for the galaxy now as an app do you feel it's lost back hard physicality is something well I will say that the person who came up to me and told me how they play it on the toilet every morning that was something I had not expected and questions from the audience I was wondering if the panel could give us a check-in on the state of diversity in board games both geographically and I

I know the answer generally is not good enough but like if you can maybe single booster like you know shout outs or let us know how that's going what's what's happening I have first of all I have a short thing about this that I was gonna read or say at the end of the session but I'll say in a moment but also it's coming out of the mouth of a white guy so how about someone who isn't a white guy would like to talk about how they feel in this industry right now games right now coming from video games and seeing all the indie devs here the pronouns and stuff like that and then stepping into the board game industry two years ago almost it was kind of shocking to see the lack of diversity happening at the moment yeah I mean the magnitude of the you know issue should not be understated right like this industry has been primarily servicing a very particular

audience for a long time an audience that absolutely deserves good games but it's not it hasn't been inclusive as a priority right which means that it caters specifically to its own audience and is has a tough time spreading that love around if you will luckily there are some great designers and other people including people right here who are working hard at increasing diversity increasing representation in games making players more comfortable at events and trying to just be ambassadors to other people because this hobby will only improve with more viewpoints with more perspectives they you know if we keep having the same people making the games or you know making games for the same people we'll keep making the same games but yeah the more people we bring in the more things perspectives we have be more interesting experiences we have and that's what everyone wants yeah honestly yeah I just want to talk to a bit more about the accessibility issue at least with our app a lot I think that

we're trying to do is make board games more accessible to people so you don't have to read this huge rule book to play them you can just start and experience board games and fall in love with them and become a designer and geographic accessibility is hard yeah as well because like as we've discussed like shipping is hard and so not not just shipping but also manufacturing a product to serve different markets and different languages like there are a lot of considerations that have to be made for that and when it's a physical product it's just difficult when it's an expensive physical product it's even harder and it's like what happens when you have so much stock of this in this language and like oh you know you're making all these decisions and at any point it can go wrong and so a lot of publishers are really gun shy about that and so I feel like we as consumers need to be very enthusiastic and ask for these things because you know that is kind of how the current capitalist interplay works so hey Anna can I briefly I'll say you have been an indie dev as well you've been a video game developer so you've seen both sides of the thing how does it feel like you have

been to a couple of board game events now to come back to a video games corner you're suggesting it's great there's so much diversity and it's great seeing so many women and non-binary people and you just don't see that board game events I mean the customers are women and and non-binary people but the people making content it's just white guys I'm gonna say something about this and this is what I was gonna say at the end I read something really saddening last month retrospective about the impact of gamergate of which there is still a lot of fallout and it was about the amount of young women who had written to leading women in the industry saying that they're not gonna work in games because of what happened it's a very real casualty rate and those are careers and those are games and those are ideas

that we never get to see because those people have decided that they don't want to put up with the BS of everything that has happened and I've had I still have many conversations with women peers and with people of color about the difficulties and the obstacles that they still encounter in the industry like now a writer who's really dear to me passed away last month which is a lady could Ursula Le Guin who is a science fiction Titan for most of her career she's a woman working in a man's world and she is all too aware of the imbalances and she challenged them she called them out this is something that she actually said at a convention kind of I don't know hundred miles away from something like this convention we're at now she said I'd like to ask the men here to consider idly in some spare moment whether by any chance they have been building walls to keep the women out or to keep them in their place and what they may have lost by doing so and that

sounds really contemporary it doesn't it but that was actually said at a convention in 1975 and I hate that that just sounds completely relevant today because it does it's a reminder that we've got to keep working hard and that games or science fiction or comics all these industries that come on let's face it folks we're all adjacent to each other we're all the same sorts of folks we still have this problem and there's still so much that we have to do and consciously or unconsciously it folks like me who look like me who are me who perpetuate this and it's on folks like me who look like me and who are me to address it and to fix it that's that would have been a really good vinegar but it is I'm just frustrated that she said that like before I existed she was in a room full of mostly men saying like dudes come on get with it sorry that was a bit of a digression the next question hello hi

okay so I kind of have a question / comment in respect to the digitisation of board games the convenience that it brings and also the piracy of it specifically tabletop simulator you're able to go on the workshop and just download literally every board game for the most part the ones that people have been willing to create do you guys see that as a problem it's increasing accessibility but you're not making any money from it and have you considered digit digitizing in some way similar to that or is there a possibility of partnering with tabletop simulator to like form a contract like maybe not charging the users but making money from what tabletop simulator gets in terms of revenue by hosting your game on it anymore at first very quick I mean I think this is a really good point and it's only increasingly relevant because everybody know I know how's tabletop simulator but also like how many of you folks have used it how many people here a plate

surgeon simulator because for me it's still an experience where I'm trying to play a game and I do this and that's me rolling my dice yeah it's certainly not the best but it's at least an opportunity to be able to play with someone that's across the world it's kind of a cool thing yeah it's nothing that gonna get away from the physical as well yeah so I mean I'll talk a bit about this I'm gonna disclaimer what I'm gonna say first just because like you know I am just its sole person I do not represent you know Fantasy Flight as per day or whatever and like I can't speak to like our corporate feeling on this right but that being said yeah I play tabletop simulator like I know it sounds of people playing tabletop simulator right it's it's a great tool and it you're right it is great for accessibility and putting games online like that is fantastic but just as broadly across the industry not everybody can just sign with tabletop simulator and give rights away

right there's all sorts of different legal stipulations based on intellectual property based on licenses based on Quality Assurance you know like of you know the quality of the product that's on tabletop simulator and if it meets with a company's standards and so well that that model does work for some companies it doesn't for others there's never gonna be I don't think a world where every single board game company all you know licenses with tabletop simulator and we have this one great digital portal for all board games that being said I I think that these kind of digitization projects are really awesome and really friendly to fans I mean like but like look at race for the galaxy right by putting out a more controlled app experience they're able to offer an app that way more functional and way easier to use than tabletop simulator ever was right and so some companies want to take approaches like that instead well with race and with quite a few of my games if

it's a non-commercial enterprise I've done licenses with my games ukata has to court the king board game arena had a race for many years and gave us no money so I'm in general favor in favor of non-commercial licenses to anyone who's not making money off of it to do it I think it's great or people playing my games I'm all for that nice thank you very much hmm I have one very minor to say but like for me like it feels kind of awkward to say this but I do strongly feel that no one is playing Star Wars Imperial assault just for the experience of the rules they are playing it partly for the miniatures and for the enjoyment of being in a room with their friends you know rolling dice and having this physical experience which you you mentioned earlier without the right why we won't lose to you know digital apps at anytime soon and I feel similarly

about the tabletop simulator I think it provides a great service but I don't think it's really harmful right one other final note on that in some cases for some games and I suspect that may be true for Imperial assault there's third-party third-party licensing rights that may make it hard for a company to allow a game to do it because their own contract to license the you know Star Wars for example may preclude it so that's a obstacle that's really not at the game publisher level it's at the IP licensing level and that's that's valid I still think the biggest obstacle is that I just do that all the miniatures fall over but maybe I have poor taste and I'm a Luddite maybe it'll get really good eventually if they keep updating it that's that's fair hi hi so I for a long time have thought that there's that that spectrum between fully digital and fully physical board games with all these these cool hybrid in-between and I know there's

Fantasy Flight Interactive now but also what do you guys think in general about the idea of studios that do board games and video games that they come up with an idea and then they decide whether it's going to be physical or digital or a hybrid rather than being a company that just does one and then licenses out to another studio to do the the other right from a business point of view you have the problem at the moment the distribution networks are totally different right and so you have to assemble a different distribution network if you're trying to get into the other industry either way so if distribution gets solved then I think you'll see a lot more companies that are willing to move a project either way I had a discussion about this with a gentleman earlier today about the fact that I don't consider the actual game design that different implementation is

very different but in terms of getting good gameplay I don't consider them two different markets no that's fair enough I was going to say on the design side as well anyone here know about Fallout New Vegas being partly just paper prototyped in almost Fallout a video game took a very long time a lot of people to make but it didn't hurt to have a few folks around the table with bits of paper because it turns out that that's a valid way to design something yeah I was doing a licensed game and I ended up playing a paper prototype of it with executives from Warner Brothers Interactive over Skype to show them where we were going long before we had any video game up and running yeah I mean coming from video game background I think they were prototyping is super important before you even touch a computer and you should paper prototype your mechanics see if they even work saying that I don't think there are many board game companies that also have access to making their own video games they usually just focus on

board games and then they'll maybe license it out to some other video game company I think like probably Fantasy Flight is the only one that has like I'm Anna am I correct that the what was the race to the North Pole the first I used game that was developed to partly be an app supported yeah or game app game was that developed deliberately sort of in parallel yes okay actually the designer of the game is right here he's like sitting right over there sorry oh yeah I mean or the jack box TV games yeah jack box TV piece of furniture you talking and nobody explodes for the recording yes that was mentioned keep talking and nobody explodes which is as stressful as it

sounds yeah I'd say that the the production is definitely different from a video game and a board game and one of the things that ends up changing the most for the final product is those production budgets and in the production pipeline you can't always fit everything that you want into a video game in there and you also can't fit everything inside the game box that you want to fit in there and I would like to just open this question to any of you how would you feel how do you feel that designing board games specifically has changed your design methodology to say I can only have so many cards or I can only use so many different types of pieces and how has that influenced your designs I've got a weird answer for this one actually cute so I did game on Kickstarter which is quite exciting and on Kickstarter's we have these things called stretch goals and when you do a stretch goal you're like we promise that if we make this much money we'll add this component or this mechanic and often it's a physical component or mechanic and you can over promise or you

can make a decision where you don't realize that producing this thing like say poker cards are printed on a 54 card press form which means any increment to 54 cards is good but the second you go over that you have to make an entire new press form and so like we had a situation where we were like three cards over that we promise two backers and so we were paying for you know an extra dollar on the games production cost which is like was like 20% more for that particular element which is you know these mistakes can happen and there they can sometimes end companies when they over promise and so that risk is something that didn't exist when I was like a fantasy flight where we'd make a decision and be like oh yeah no we can't have that many dice molds change the mechanic and no one will know and it's fine yeah I I do think what what kind of games you work on and what kind of constraints you work on why are your brain you know I you see this all the

time with designers you know designers would work on one type of game for a while and then they'll move into a new a new you know genre of game and they'll actually bring a lot of the knowledge they had from their other genre they're working on into the new game and like you can kind of see it's like oh this game was designed by this person who did this other kind of mechanic for a very long time and you totally can feel that in the design I think similarly constraints kind of train how people develop their skills over time but I mean I think that's true in the digital space as well as the tabletop space I mean like you know this is cut the limit on this is constantly raising but you have like render limits and all that kind of thing that so you know people working on digital games have all sorts of constraints they're working under they're just a little different than the tabletop constraints of our printing budget I'm lucky enough that I do a lot of games for a publisher who says don't worry about the components just get the game right what a dream yeah well this

can have some odd effects when we were doing roll and we were well over a hundred days we went back to gay Tom Olsen said do you really mean that and he said no get the game right don't worry about it then when he got the print quote there are a lot of dice in this game right but he then worked a lot and tried different suppliers until he could do it at reasonable quality and cost and so on and he didn't place any constraints on us about how we do the games so you know it's it's you know an interesting thing because there are times when we know we're pushing the limits and it's like well game you hasn't complained yet okay very well I love the idea of somebody I did speaking as someone who writes an awful lot the idea of a person sang just do whatever you like is I love the idea of constraints thumb and things you to

do whatever is the least helpful thing in a creative industry when people put up barriers for you I feel that gives you direction if somebody came to me and said No Limits I just be like challenge accepted this is someone who has struggled against hello so I think that innovation tends to come from having expectations defied and certainly as games have proliferated more and more we're playing games that as as players deliver different kinds of experiences so what I'd love to hear from each of you and certainly from you as well Paul is just the last game that you played that really surprised you good or bad that that sort of helped you see something that maybe you hadn't quite seen before or thought of before I'm gonna just throw that to the wolves while I think so Phil time for me I think I've got an answer but folks all

of you if you have an answer for this well you know what I'm gonna go with a bad one and I won't name the name but I didn't want a name in shame I will not come on guys let's be professional but I did play a game recently that was mechanically brilliant had a lot of very good ideas and was you know overall like I really enjoyed playing it but the wrapping of it the sort of theme around it was so incredibly uninteresting to me it was like a game where like the mechanics were beautiful but the aesthetics were this fair classical thing that I've seen a million times before you know works elves it's you know you don't tell anyone he has a theory but and sort of that understanding of like you know mechanics are important and very relevant and you can have the most brilliant mechanics in the world but if you're you know but if the other elements of the game don't sink to it and don't make those mechanics sing it's

an experience can fall flat or the experience can just kind of be sour even and you know as a designer that now makes me much more cognizant of the themes that I choose and like I know some designers are just like put whatever on it you know you hire the artists or whatever but like now I'm making very you know informed decisions about like how the art should look how inclusive it should be that sort of thing as a whole decisions that should be made with thought and care so I work with weigh waaahh on the roll series and so he came up with something that'll be in the next expansion that effectively models credit asset swaps when I saw all the things you could do with it give up some of your treasury limit get a die sell this do this I mean my brain it's flooded and the thought that you could get something that dry you know I mean

credit asset swaps not exactly the most exciting turn in the world and make it come alive and make it work in a game that had already been designed so this is in an expansion that blew my mind as far as games that don't work I always have trouble playing lots of games because I'm very picky and when I play games the hardest thing for me is I see what they could have been and that just eats away at me I don't have time to play board games anymore because you're making them but whenever I did play one recently and the thing I noticed now against the rule and this game blew my mind because I had a 50-page rulebook and I did not have time for that yep I'm gonna Andrew do you have one yeah so I think the last game that really surprised me was um it's actually a series of games on the

exit series for any of you who play there are a series of a it's one play escape room games they kind of simulates the experience of playing an escape room with kind of the different puzzles and unlocking these different puzzles and I I don't really want to since they're one use and once you know the riddle they're done I'm not gonna spoil any of them for you but um they each kind of break the rules in ways you might not expect and I found that those games definitely surprised me at the table in a really good way and a really enjoyable way I encourage anyone who has a chance to go out and check out exit or unlock or any of the other kind of escape room type games I think they do something really cool I think I saw a couple of the lounge oh yeah there's a couple in that I will very quickly say having just played it fog of love maybe because it is sort of cooperative but not in a game where you hide information and choices from each other and define your own objectives and like that's insane for

something that is supposed to be cooperative there is a video up on our site about it please check it out we've got a couple minutes like we can do I think at least two questions maybe three all right hello drawing comparison to the video games where we don't really have to get it right the first time because we can easily distribute patches I wonder if you comment on certain advantages possibly with having these in-app and integrations where we have the manual an app or certain challenges you've had with physical ones where you can't really change it until you have an expansion or something Oh printing a game and then finding errors before it's in consumers hands is the worst you know we see it all the time obviously the digital digital games are awesome because of that like our app integrated games being able to patch things out but also digital games have a lot more bugs and have a lot more difficulties that come along with that and also they require the constant updating and patching is almost expected

for them so while it is awesome to finally be able to kind of change our products after launch it also comes with just a ton of ongoing maintenance and work for that product line going forward features of our app is that you can update your rulebook so you can have your your rules they're all indexed and reference them and you can update them if you have a correction to make or a second edition that you're doing so that's that's one of the cool things we're doing it feels like a tiny little miracle actually it's much harder with components though like I mean I've had night nightmares and it is like there is a deeply unbalanced character that I put into Star Wars Imperial assault due to my own failures that haunts me to this day and you know you can't you're in like I know that there are still copies out there that don't have the second edition version or that don't have competitor players who went out and got the e rotted cards that we printed and gave out of tournaments and like I've just like made the experience slightly worse for anyone who bought

that version of the game and it kills me and I mean we do produce wait ways around it right like FF G has done a lot of competitive physical games and will print cards that are answers to cards that might have been a little too strong before or cards that very specifically synergize with slightly weaker cards that existed in the past and that sort of design is often a very fun design challenge but is kind of a result of our own you know human failings but yeah I mean and errata is hard because most players don't look it up you know most players assume that we got it right unfortunately one more I think please thank you it was a great talk thank you very much as someone who has recently made a large print edition of a beloved game for my parents to play I was wondering if there's any particular focus in the industry to make visual accessibility more of a thing because our text is often very tiny that's I mean

unfortunately there is not a big push for that I would like there to be I think that it would be very important and I think the more people who make that request and who actually like sending emails to publishers like I think it would be very cool if you you know show people who ever published the original version of that game you made the updated version of send them like hey we made this and just let them know because companies only you know their main focus is what their consumers are doing and if consumers aren't emailing them and letting them know what they feel they end up not thinking about it which is unfortunate and thoughtless right I will say two things we've been trying to improve the colorblindness in our games but also I find that many of the people who do the graphics of games are in their 20s and they have excellent eyesight and I'm an old dude with wears glasses so I will complain myself about various features of games

and the graphic person is like hmm I didn't think that was a problem so there is some advantage where the old white dude still it's gonna say surely apps have an audio element yeah we are making sure that all our tutorials are completely voiceover home that you can just and in different languages as well so it's accessible as possible to as many people as possible I would quickly add I don't know if any of you folks have heard of 64-ounce games they do Braille overlays for things like cards and board games so if you're playing a game like I don't know the resistance have long which is a card game you deal cards out to people they look at who they are and they go I am this person on this team if they're partially sighted or they cannot see at all it's exactly the same for them if they feel the role that they are they can enjoy the game like other people I think some of these problems can be solved if we're just a bit more inventive maybe I think we're pretty much out of time aren't we thank you all very much for coming

consider idly please in some spare moment what it is that you think you can do to make it gaming better and I'm addressing some of you more than others we got attacked a little bit online for talking about this last year at this panel probably get attacked online again and we'll probably keep happening until we win thank you everyone [Applause]